Monday, November 28, 2016

Already a contender
for the best of 2004 list – and, as Letterman used to exclaim, it’s a cartoon! Sylvain Chomet’s film has a
plot, but it would sound dumb if I tried to summarize it, and that’s one of the
things I loved about the movie. Like Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (which quickly comes to my mind only because it’s the
last animated film I saw in a theatre), it has a unique sensibility – one
pitched at a previously uncharted angle to the world. It’s not quite as far-out
as Miyazaki’s film though – another thing I loved about the film is that
despite its brief 80-minute running time, and despite a trailer that makes the
thing look like a blur of activity, it’s actually surprisingly languid
(especially for a cartoon!) Perhaps
half the running time is taken up merely with wonderfully precise observation –
of a fat old dog’s routine while waiting for his owners to get home; of the
bizarre mealtime rituals of a trio of old-time singers. In this respect and
others, the closing dedication to the memory of Jacques Tati doesn’t seem at
all gratuitous.

I also loved
(someone stop me here before I gush) the distinct queasiness at the film’s
centre. One of the notional protagonists is a Tour de France cyclist whose
non-stop training has driven him to physical grotesquerie and apparent near
catatonia – registering neither highs nor lows, he goes through the movie like
a dazed war survivor. His mother – who sets out with the dog to find him after
he’s kidnapped – is essentially a tyrant operating on a blinkered view of the
world. And so on. The movie has an elongated, angular visual style that’s far
more realistic than Miyazaki’s work, and it’s constantly diverting and
dramatic, but it also skirts the fringes of nightmare, as if the elements of
our world had been stretched slightly too far and might at any moment collapse.
Sometimes, it goes in for Hanna-Barbera-type ideas (at one point the dog is
used as a spare tire) but usually it’s closer to plausibility than that. Like I
said, there’s no way to pass on the coordinates: you have to go there for
yourself.

Spirited Away was the surprise winner of last year’s Oscar
for best animated film, I don’t think Belleville
can beat this year’s favourite, Finding
Nemo, but it deserves to. Finding
Nemo is a fine movie too, but when you compare it to Chomet’s film you see
how calculated it is. Nemo has no
downtime – it sweeps across you like a fresh cold wave, wearing the brightest
colours you’ve ever seen. Sure, it’s not just for kids, but if it’s for adults,
it’s for adults on definite downtime. The
Triplets of Belleville is the real deal – a cartoon that most kids probably
wouldn’t get. To me, that’s the kind of thing that could become a cult movie.

The Cooler

In Wayne Kramer’s
debut film, William H Macy plays a Vegas loser whose luck is so bad that he can
kill your winning streak just by standing next to you; he’s consequently hired
by casino boss Alec Baldwin to move around the tables and keep down expenses.
One day he falls in love with waitress Maria Bello and his luck turns round –
now people are winning jackpots all around him. It’s a big problem for Baldwin,
a Vegas traditionalist trying to keep away the modern theme park
family-friendly glitz. This nostalgia is one of the film’s dominant qualities,
and you could almost miss the fact that old Vegas – world capital of gangsters,
hookers, etc. – wasn’t all wonderful (although Baldwin’s unashamed, utterly
amoral use of violence is unflinchingly presented). Otherwise it’s all about
the love story, which is presented with a lot of wistful sentimentality,
introspection, and a sexual specificity that – given the musty nature of the
surroundings – almost seems out of place. Nothing about The Cooler is very surprising, but most of the individual scenes
play pretty well, aided by committed acting. The overall arc though seems
unsophisticated. Underneath it all, it’s a transplanted fairy tale with an
inevitable happy-ever-after trajectory, and fundamentally you’re never doing
much more than waiting until it runs its course.

The Fog of War

Errol Morris’
Oscar-nominated documentary reviews the life and times of Vietnam-era US
secretary of defense Robert McNamara, anchored around a series of interviews
with the man himself, now 87. Filmed in vivid close-up, staring directly into
the camera, McNamara remains a commanding presence. It’s an amazing life story
– he was at the heart of the bombing strategy against Japan during WW2; he rose
to the top of the Ford motor company, and later ran the World Bank. He brought
to all of these roles a piercing analytical mind – a meticulous focus on
objectives and processes. But such rationality might seem to verge on
inhumanity, and some have seen McNamara almost as the embodiment of the devil –
he admits himself that if the US had lost WW2, he might have been prosecuted as
a war criminal.

Of course, Vietnam
was the ultimate moral meltdown – an endeavor entered into without clarity or,
it seems here, real conviction. McNamara attributes some of that now to basic
misunderstandings: the Americans believed it was about global positioning; the
Vietnamese thought it was about Vietnam itself. He thinks JFK would have found
a way to get out before the casualties mounted, but the sobering point is that
Kennedy had already let things go too far. The film has numerous extracts from
the White House tapes of conversations between McNamara and Lyndon Johnson,
chilling for their superficiality and sense of hopelessness. Eventually
McNamara submitted a memo arguing for a fundamental change in direction, but
even if he could turn back, Johnson
couldn’t, and McNamara was gone a few weeks later.

Morris has a flashy
visual style, including repeated use of things like dominoes falling on a map
of Vietnam, and the film has an immaculate score by Philip Glass. It seems to
me a bit overdone, and yet in a certain way this approach helps make the point
– Morris’ towering cinematic edifice underlines McNamara’s hollow
intellectualism, and the film’s over-craftedness serves as a metaphor for his
tragic limitations. Ultimately, the film is a close cousin to Morris’ last
documentary about Fred Leuchter, an expert in execution technology, and
Holocaust denier. But Leuchter is merely a small-time buffoon next to McNamara,
and you sometimes feel The Fog of War slightly
unequal to its subject, yielding as if acknowledging that it will take a higher
court than cinema to make him accountable. “Is it the feeling?” asks Morris, in
response to another question dodged, “that you are damned if you do and damned
if you don’t?” “Yeah, that’s right,” McNamara responds. “And I’d rather be
damned if I don’t.”

Sunday, November 20, 2016

I spent the
Christmas season in Edmonton, where any discussion of movies began and ended
with one film: The Lord of the Rings: The
Return of the King. It might be the film that has it all, especially once
the New York film critics named it the best picture of the year. A
sixteen-year-old boy of my acquaintance pronounced it the best movie he’d ever
seen. Normally this would be easily dismissed – the historical perspective,
movie-wise, of the average sixteen-year-old stretches back maybe as far as Gladiator – but this kid is a fervent
movie fan, already possessing encyclopedic knowledge, and so reminds me of
myself at that age. At which point I recall that at the age of fourteen, I
would have solemnly sworn on a stack of Bibles (or on a stack of Starlog magazines) that Star Trek: the Motion Picture was the
finest film ever made.

Christmas in Edmonton

But I soon grew out
of that. When I was sixteen, I started keeping a record of movies I was
watching, and the record shows that early on I was watching Luis Bunuel and
Orson Welles on BBC2, and if I wasn’t watching Jean-Luc Godard it’s only
because I had no way of getting to see the movies. That was in pre-video North
Wales, as inhospitable a climate for movies back then as one could imagine in
the English-speaking world. Present-day Edmonton seems like much more fertile
ground. So we asked the kid if he’s getting into foreign films at all. And
here’s his answer: “If I want to read, I’ll buy a book.”

OK – it’s an easy
laugh line. But the actions speak louder than the words, and the fact is he
doesn’t watch foreign films (he did allow, by way of meagre compensation, that
he’d seen Amelie). In itself, how one
kid draws the line doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. But the thing is, I’ve
had conversations like this many times now. Take the couple sitting next to us
at a wedding reception – we stumbled through a series of failed
conversation-starters, until I mentioned movies and he came to life. He was a
student, a real enthusiast. His choice for best movie ever made: Star Wars. At least he seemed contrite
about not having seen any Antonioni.

I’ve written in this
vein before, and I’m going to keep on doing it periodically because classic
cinema is in trouble and if I can just drum into one person that there’s
something else going on there, it’ll be worth it. We have the Cinematheque
Ontario, and it’s a marvel, but even if the Cinematheque sells out (which
happens only in a distinct minority of cases) that represents by my count
something like 0.01% of the population of Toronto. In other words,
extinction-level territory. And those crowds are usually pretty gray-haired
too. So every convert counts. Otherwise I’m worried I’m going to end up like
one of those guys in Fahrenheit 451
who embodies the only memory of a lost masterpiece. True, the analogy doesn’t
hold because the works will mostly still exist in archives, or on DVD. But no
one will ever watch them, except crazy academics.

The Return of the King

It’s a tough sell,
because it’s not hard to understand the measuring system by which The Return of the King represents
everything one could wish for. The movie is truly a mammoth piece of
filmmaking. Jackson’s vision has been minutely imagined, and almost flawlessly
executed. The film blends intimate struggle with sweeping conflict; it has
ample room for introspection and suffering. Unlike many epics, it actually
seems to be about something meaningful; about a literate, complex society torn
apart by a fundamental struggle about its identity and direction. The varied
races and tribes and creatures don’t seem like mere window dressing (like
another wacky made-up creation thrown into the Star Wars cantina) but like substantive manifestations. The film
has real physical presence. Maybe once in a while there’s something that looks
a bit too fake (Orlando Bloom bringing down the giant elephant; Ian McKellen
riding the eagle), but these are minor cavils against such a consistent
realization of a fantastic world.

The reader may
detect though a somewhat rote quality to this praise, and I can’t deny that
fact. Truth is, I don’t know how to summon true enthusiasm for the film. In a
few weeks, I’ll write about the filmmaker Stan Brakhage, who represents an
entirely separate conception of what cinema might be about. For now, let me say
that my response to Jackson’s film is more like the response I have to a new
office tower. You admire the engineering and the coordination and the massive
human effort required to anticipate it all and hold it all together (I am not
being flippant at all about this). But unless you’re an engineering student, none of that can provoke a truly emotional response.
Unlike the way something about the building’s line against the sky strikes you
from a distance, or the way it reflects the early morning light: a purely
aesthetic effect of course reflecting the sum total of those detailed efforts,
but transcending them, carving out its own existence.

Significant connection

Although The Return of the King certainly
evidences human and political dynamics that have some relevance to our own
circumstances, it remains essentially a depiction of a self-contained world. I
didn’t like the first film in the trilogy very much at all – it lost me right
at the start with all the malarkey setting up the rings and the kingdoms and
whatever. The second film seemed essentially like a grand-scale battle picture,
and I enjoyed it on that level. The final picture has clear narrative lines and
greater spectacle than ever (although less of the vivid sense of New Zealand
landscapes which served as such a compensation in the first film). But whenever
it drifted off into the ethereal musings or the quasi-religious parallels or
the paeans to the brave hobbits, I lost patience. The last twenty minutes or
so, which drone on about what becomes of the hobbits after the big adventure is
over, seemed to me a complete waste of time.

Because, for all its
might, the film doesn’t carve for me a significant connection with our own
world. I mentioned points of identification, but they’re a matter of mere
recognition, of easy parallels and allegories. Nothing about the film’s world seriously
illuminates anything about ours. But for most viewers, that’s not a concern. One
could take the view that we’re past the point where we need small-scale movies
about intimate issues, except that you look around you and realize that the raw
material of human interaction continues to confound us. One could conclude that
we’re past needing to ask basic questions about cinema, or past any
susceptibility to being impressed by simplicity and purity, except that we
haven’t exhausted the potential of poetry, or painting, or any other of the art
forms that have been around fifty times as long. Of course, the appeal of the
epic isn’t new – D W Griffith and Cecil B DeMille were there at the start. But
now we’ve been gasping in awe for the better part of a century.

Wednesday, November 16, 2016

Anthony Minghella’s
long-awaited adaptation of the Charles Frazier novel (which I haven’t read)
seems to have struck most people as a relative disappointment. Like Minghella’s
The English Patient and The Talented Mr. Ripley, it’s
immaculately composed, and like those two films, you occasionally feel the
weight of its craftsmanship might crush you. In 1860s North Carolina, Jude Law
and Nicole Kidman experience the briefest of romances before he’s sent off to
the Civil War and she’s left to fend for herself on her late father’s farm. Law
suffers through hell and ends up at a military hospital, from which he
eventually deserts, and sets out to walk back to her; she gradually gets
herself in order with the help of a feisty lost soul played by Renee Zellweger.

As Law passes through
a series of brief encounters and Kidman builds up her self-reliance, the film
sometimes seems to lack any thematic coherence other than a vague notion of the
disruptive horror of war crossed with a familiar gospel of personal renewal
rooted in love’s reforming powers. Still, I did find it reasonable effective.
The film barely acknowledges slavery as an underpinning for the war or a key
component of the South’s culture, but in a way this reinforces its impact as a
depiction of a world gone mad: the men at the front suffer meaningless
indignities and the people left behind succumb to pointless despair or
corruption. Unfortunately, Minghella isn’t very good at depicting chaos – with
the exception of Philip Seymour Hoffman, who plays a warped preacher with a style
worthy of a Peckinpah film, everyone seems prettified, daintily inserted
(rather than dropped) into the landscape. And the film has one of those silly
endings that make America resemble one big communal kibbutz. Nothing about it
feels intuitive. But the weight of Minghella’s deliberation does result in a
properly somber meditation about humanity in a time of war, even if you feel
that a more rigorous handling of the material might have delivered something
better.

Paycheck

The latest
adaptation of a Philip K Dick story (which I haven’t read either) has clear
similarities to the last one, Minority
Report. Ben Affleck plays a science whiz whose memory is erased after he
executes a big technology project, and using clues he left for himself, he
races against time to find out what he’s done, and why people want to kill him.
The premise is pretty interesting, but the handling is remarkably
undistinguished, with little attention paid to anything except sustaining a
shallow momentum.

The biggest
disappointment is that John Woo directed this. I’m not among his biggest
admirers, but even the largely ignored Windtalkers
evidenced far more passion than this pallid effort. Woo executes the obligatory
car chase in a startlingly cursory fashion, and when a dove flies through a
door toward the end, it seems like a pathetic last-ditch attempt to assert his
signature. Affleck is indifferently handled, and Uma Thurman, after her iconic
performance in Kill Bill, just drifts
through the movie – although I admit I find a drifting Thurman more interesting
than most other actresses. For all the film’s obvious faults, I must admit I
was engaged by it – the way it shies away from virtually every challenge put to
it is almost resonant.

House of Sand and Fog

Vadim Perelman makes
his directorial debut with this adaptation of Andre Dubus III’s book (yeah, you
guessed it) about a troubled young woman who’s evicted from her house for not
paying a trivial tax amount. While she flounders around, the house is auctioned
off, at a rock bottom price, to an Iranian immigrant who plans to flip it as
the first step to building a better life. With the deputy sheriff who’s fallen
in love with her, she tries everything possible to get the house back, with
horrible consequences. This is one of the most intensely sad (one could say
depressing) films of the year, with the tersely evocative dialogue, the precise
and highly sympathetic acting and the sandy/foggy photography creating a
bleakly fascinating environment. Jennifer Connelly and Ben Kingsley are quite
perfect in the lead roles.

It's one of the
year’s most accomplished movies in certain ways, but ultimately seems to lack
the weight to equal its grasp of atmosphere and emotion. Without the house, she
almost loses whatever centre she has; he regards it primarily as an asset in a
business transaction, but his regret at his place in life, and his dreams of
renewal, parallel her own longing. Eventually, they find a shared space that’s
almost romantic in its idealism, despite the extreme tragedy of the
circumstances. The movie’s composure is periodically broken by eruptions of
violence that perfectly convey the underlying tensions. But in the end, the
message isn’t much more than that a house is not a home, which doesn’t feel
like quite enough. Still, it’s an excellent mood piece.

Finding Nemo

Two years ago my
nephew Michael’s prize possession was his DVD of the Jim Carrey Grinch movie. Giving in to relentless
urging, I sat down over Christmas and started watching it with him, except I
was really watching Mike, who repeated every other line, howled with laughter,
and kept prodding me to make sure I was getting all the good stuff. Problem is,
that movie didn’t actually have too much good stuff. This year he’d moved on to
Finding Nemo (which I don’t think is
based on a book). After much cajoling, my wife and I sat down with him to watch
it on Christmas Day evening (the other adults were in another room watching the
DVD set of The Mary Tyler Moore Show).

We had slight
misgivings due not just to Mike’s questionable taste, but to the weight of food
and alcohol and the definite prospect of falling asleep. But we stayed awake,
and joined the shoals of adults who’ve counted this animated fish saga as one
of the year’s best. There’s the obvious visual panache and the sly adult appeal
of the Albert Brooks-Ellen DeGeneres double act (much gentler than the Eddie
Murphy-Mike Myers stuff in Shrek,
which I found a little too strenuous). But the film’s wondrousness lies
primarily in how it takes an apparently scrupulous sense of the ocean and
reimagines it as a meticulous subculture, with an attention to detail that goes
way beyond the anthropomorphism of the old Disney films like The Aristocats or The Jungle Book. The portrayal of the seagulls moronically chanting
“Mine,” is one of those things that could forever change the way you look at a
piece of the world. Together with his thumbs-down for The Cat in the Hat, it looks like Mike’s skills as a movie pundit
are definitely improving.

Monday, November 14, 2016

An entertaining rant
recently from the eloquent Rick Salutin in his Globe and Mail column, where he called film “surely the most
over-hyped, self-congratulatory cultural form ever.” He threw his sharpest
arrows at the whole notion of a “communal experience” of movie-watching,
calling it “a pathetic substitute for community (compared to) the real
community that can develop in live theatre or music, where the performers react
to the reactions of the audience.” He went on: “Movie watching…isolates people,
de-communalizes them, like the guy on the plane guffawing bizarrely at the
in-flight plane you aren’t watching…That is why films are essentially a
demobilizing, anti-political force, no matter how earnestly they take
‘political’ positions. In their experiental effect, they separate people, make
them feel passive and acted on, or acted at, and subject to despair, control
and manipulation.:

A certain community

I’m quoting this at
too much length, but it’s so delightfully giddy. Salutin ultimately pays a
tribute to watching films on video, valorizing “the chance to talk about what
you see (which) thus creates a certain community. You can also review the tape
dozens or hundreds of times, focusing on its details and nuance, as one did in
the oral tradition, where the epics were retold, often in tune with the
seasons, so that cultural sensitivities got built up not by adding to the
quantity of products but by gaining depth in a limited few.”

Gee, so I guess
those extended versions of Alien
might not be such a waste of money after all (especially if watched in tune
with the seasons). OK, enough from me already. I didn’t quote Salutin to take a
shot at him, but because I was genuinely taken by the passion of his antipathy.
And I could come up with material to help his case. The recent documentary Cinemania featured five New Yorkers
whose brains have been comprehensively addled by too much time at the movies.
I’ve often written myself about my mixed feelings about spending so much time
on this stuff. It’s an experience too close for comfort to voyeurism; it’s
passive and uninvolved.

But that much would
be true of anything, taken beyond civilized bounds. I doubt very much whether
someone who went to the theatre fifteen or twenty times a week would be in much
better shape than the Cinemania
geeks, real community or not. And while some of my favourite artistic
experiences have come in the theatre, I’ve almost as often had the sense of
being surrounded by a brain-dead throng who would applaud the phone book if it
helped to justify the ticket price.

Actually, that’s the
straw man in Salutin’s argument – he contrasts a lowbrow conception of cinema
with a highbrow one of the theatre. He’s largely right about the likes of S.W.A.T. and Lara Croft – the movies are such seamless constructions, so coldly
devoid of any of the loose ends of real life, that their supposed mastery as
entertainment machines edges depression. The new digital technology, with its
cold metallic feel, only accentuates this looming alienation. And it does seem
to me that even people who primarily watch that kind of film, citing the need
to escape and unwind, often don’t really seem convinced by their own arguments,
as if realizing how this embrace of passivity imperils as much as it liberates.

Talking during movies

But that has nothing
to do with Bresson or Rivette or Renoir or Welles or Godard or a hundred other
directors I could mention. Only by not even trying could a viewer of those
films feel “passive and acted on.” And frankly, whether a “certain community”
attends one’s viewing of them is neither here nor there. Like anything else, your
experience of the film deepens in discussing it afterwards, in reading informed
community on it, and viewing it again with those counterpoints in mind. But
it’s a little weird how Salutin almost seems spooked by the idea of a spectator
sitting alone, engrossed in the screen. It’s as if his commendable distrust of
authoritarianism, of political high-handedness, of creeping imperialism, had
led him to challenge art’s basic premise – to conclude that identifiable
creators are inherently suspect, and that only something formed through a
collective process can be trusted. It’s an interesting argument, but I guess my
experience doesn’t lead me there. I don’t see anything wrong with giving
yourself to a good film – with a questioning mind, of course, but not necessarily
a rebellious one.

Salutin’s rant leads
him to some weird positions – he approvingly cites a semi-retired teacher from
Jamaica who “tells how surprised she was that Canadian audiences don’t talk to
each other during movies.” Well, I haven’t seen any movies in Jamaica, but I’ve
seen hundreds of them in Bermuda, and very few people would seriously defend
the hubbub that accompanies the average film there as any sort of positive
community experience. But as long as it just affects dumb movies (which is
mostly what got screened in Bermuda when I lived there) it doesn’t really
matter. So here’s the basic wrong-headedness of Salutin’s article. He
brandishes his sword against the cinema, but he should have been making a much
simpler and more useful argument – that people should go to see better films.

Werner Herzog

When Werner Herzog’s
latest film Invincible here a year
and a half ago, I wrote an article about Herzog in which I mentioned how,
somewhat to my own surprise, I found I’ve often cited him in my notes on other
directors’ films. I went on: “But I find it much easier to recognize something
as ‘Herzog-like’ than to actually summarize the man’s career. At his most
superficial, he’s an adventurer – making films all over the world, insisting on
a feeling of authenticity. He’s drawn to characters on the edge of society,
whether because of mad ambition (like the conqueror in Aguirre: Wrath of God) or inherent “difference.” For example, in
the 70s he cast former mental patient Bruno S in several films, and his movies
feature a disproportionate number of dwarfs and eccentrics.

Herzog’s in my mind
again because of reading the extended interview book Herzog on Herzog. It reveals the director as a one-of-a-kind
iconoclast who disclaims any aesthetic theories about himself, thinks the
circus is a greater art than the cinema, denies the perpetual rumours that he’s
insane while providing one anecdote after another that comes as close as dammit
to proving the point, and at every turn comes out with weird and wonderful
stuff. A pretty much random example – his anti-chickenism (to coin a noun):
“Look into the eyes of a chicken and you will see real stupidity. It is a kind
of bottomless stupidity, a fiendish stupidity. They are the most horrifying,
cannibalistic and nightmarish creatures in this world.”

In a strange way,
the book diminishes Herzog’s films as art, but it elevates them hugely as
events. I recommend the films (many of which are available on DVD) and the
book. You may watch, and read, with no thought of despair.

Wednesday, November 9, 2016

An odd pre-Christmas
line-up of movies this year. For sure, we had the traditional blockbuster, with
The Lord of the Rings opening on
December 17th and steam-rolling all in its path. I left that manly
enterprise aside until the crowds died down, with the odd consequence that I
ended up seeing four successive pictures falling within the broad parameters of
“chick flick.” Of course, I go to this kind of film all the time – the only way
I know what’s a chick flick is via the feedback I get from the guys in the
office. And as I use the term here, it’s a wide category. But as you read on, I
think you’ll see where I’m coming from.

I know release
schedules are partly accidents of circumstance, and partly the result of
decisions taken months or even years ago. But just being fanciful, it’s
tempting to think of all this box-office sensitivity as the counterpoint to
Iraq and Israel and the December 22 “orange”-level terror alert and to Time magazine choosing the American
soldier as person of the year (OK – I know Time’s
credibility ran out years ago) and to Tom DeLay on the December 21 Meet the Press (OK - that last one’s especially subjective).
However much the world might make your blood churn in the closing days of 2003,
you could count on Hollywood this year to apply something soothing.

Something’s Gotta Give

A glossy middle-aged
soap opera, directed by What Women Want’s
Nancy Meyers, in which Jack Nicholson plays a Jack Nicholson-type who’s never
dated a woman over 30, and Diane Keaton plays a Diane Keaton-type who finally
gets him to change his ways. The movie has a few easy laughs and situations
early on, including a brief nude scene by Keaton that – from this usually demure
actress – strikes me as one of the movie season’s most radical acts. Later on
it dawdles endlessly as it pointlessly postpones the inevitable, and it
outlived its welcome for me by at least half an hour. The writing is mostly
shallow and glib, and it has none of the visual mastery or sheer depth of
feeling that made Blake Edwards’ 10,
a film with a somewhat similar premise and ambiance, into a near-masterpiece.

Even so, I find the
film lingering in my mind more than I thought it would, mainly as an exercise
in star images. Keaton comes close to deconstructing her own persona, to
illustrating how her neurotic mannerisms, artful evasiveness and understated
intelligence have generally shielded her from real onscreen intimacy (with the
interesting, problematic exception of Looking
for Mr. Goodbar). And although Nicholson seems for much of the way to be
phoning it in, ultimately he allows the film the film to suggest that his
laconic coolness might long have been a cover for looming despair (I doubt it’s
true in Nicholson’s case, but it’s an interesting possibility).

Calendar Girls

A British comedy, in
the vein of The Full Monty and Saving Grace (which had the same
director, Nigel Cole) about a group of 50-plus Yorkshire women who posed nude
for a charity calendar to raise money for leukemia. The calendar became a smash
hit, raising over a million dollars to date, and the women briefly became
transatlantic celebrities, including an appearance on Jay Leno. The original
inspiration was the death from cancer of one of the husbands, and that’s
depicted here with surprisingly honest sentiment. From there, the movie turns
for a while into another plucky story about a group of outsiders fighting
against the odds, before dwindling off with the coming-to-America stuff. The
spectacle of respectable British actresses taking off their clothes is the most
interesting thing about the movie, although it’s still very restrained, and in
the overall scheme of things has been rendered entirely obsolete by the Diane
Keaton scene described above. Still, it mostly refrains from condescending to
the women, managing to celebrate the affirmative and liberating quality of the
enterprise without being too strident about it.

Mona Lisa Smile

Julia Roberts plays
a young teacher who turns up from California at New England’s women-only
Wellesley College, teaching art history. This is 1953, and the syllabus is so
rigid it might as well be chiseled into stone, but she shakes things up by
introducing her enthusiasm for modern art. At the same time, she challenges the
prevailing assumption that there can be nothing better to follow this than
marriage, motherhood, and a life spent in support of one’s husband. Of course,
she makes some progress on shaking up the group, but not as much as you might think.
The film seems to have reasonable respect for historicity in a number of ways,
sketching a surprisingly varied selection of portraits from the axis of
oppression. But it often feels like an odd piece of science fiction, like a
50’s variation on The Stepford Wives,
in which Roberts turns up as an emissary from the future to teach
enlightenment. Maybe we should be glad she doesn’t destroy the school walls
with a ray gun and lead the girls to freedom through a time portal.

The closing credits
roll over a series of 50’s advertising and other images that speak to that
age’s confined view of a woman’s place – it’s rather like the stinging
blackface montage from Bamboozled,
but without anger or real sadness. The premise seems to be that harsh emotion
is no longer required – women have come a long way since then, and we can watch
now with wistfulness and a warm superiority. On the other hand, it’s hard to
imagine a contemporary Hollywood movie fretting in such a strenuous but
ineffectual way about the obligations of masculinity. Anyway, Mona Lisa Smile does contain numerous
pleasures, such as Maggie Gyllenhaal’s unabashedly promiscuous student, and
Kirsten Dunst’s surprisingly hard-edged bitch.

The Housekeeper

Also opening the
weekend before Christmas was Claude Berri’s La
femme du menage, about a middle-aged man who employs a nubile young woman
to clean his house, has an affair with her, and then sees the relationship
develop beyond his control. Maybe this isn’t really a woman’s film in the sense
of the other three (if only because of the amount of time spent watching Emilie
Dequenne hanging round in skimpy outfits), or maybe it’s that our prototypical
notion of a French film is inherently more feminine than masculine, or maybe
that’s our prototypical notion of the French themselves. How did I get into
this? Anyway, at the risk of propagating a stereotype, The Housekeeper exhibits all the greater complexity, subtlety,
unpredictability, finesse and elegance that we associate with a French film.
Nothing about it is a huge surprise in the bigger scheme of things, but it’s
all in the seasoning of course. If not for Chirac’s questionable strike for
secularism, I might have said the holiday season belonged to the French.

Thursday, November 3, 2016

If you read enough
about film, especially the kind of writing that’s driven by a concept of the
director as author, you tend to come across a fair bit of divided commentary on
the value of a particular filmmaker’s later work. Both pro and con camps frequently
share some common observations: as a director ages, the pace gets slower; the
narrative less tightly controlled; echoes of earlier works abound; the camera
and editing technique are often simpler, less ambitious. The differences come
in the value you choose to place on these developments. The pro argument:
nearing the end of his career, all youthful impulsiveness expunged, the
director strips things down to their essence, allowing his essential themes to
emerge with greater clarity than ever. The con: he’s run out of juice and just
can’t hack it any more.

Among the directors
who’ve been debated in this light: Alfred Hitchcock (everything after Psycho), John Ford (everything after The Searchers), Billy Wilder (Fedora), Howard Hawks (everything after Rio Bravo). There are foreign examples
too, but the poles of the argument don’t seem as divergent there.

More recently, aging
directors simply seem to fade away, or at best to go and work for HBO. Norman
Jewison, who’s 77 now and still going strong, almost stands alone. His new film
The Statement is his first since The Hurricane in 1999. It’s not the most
successful film by conventional measures, and plainly looks like the work of an
old man. So can the case be made here for Jewison as an aging auteur?

Norman Jewison

By virtue of his
fame and longevity in Hollywood, supplemented with having founded the Canadian
Film Centre and maintaining a presence close to home, Jewison is now generally
regarded as one of Canada’s greatest directors. His film In the Heat of the Night won the Oscar (although he didn’t win for
directing), and he came close again with Moonstruck
and A Soldier’s Story. His varied
career also takes in musicals (Fiddler on
the Roof, Jesus Christ Superstar), violent science fiction (Rollerball), comedy (Best Friends, and his early work with
the likes of Tony Curtis and Doris Day) and contemporary satire of various
kinds (And Justice for All, Other
People’s Money).

It’s a body of work
almost as perplexing as it is eclectic, with little artistic personality beyond
a consistent sense that Jewison means well. He was reportedly upset when The Hurricane failed to gain any Oscar
nominations bar for Denzel Washington’s performance, but it was a hackneyed,
almost insultingly simplistic effort, which looked sadly anachronistic next to
that year’s Being John Malkovich, Three
Kings and Fight Club. The film
was lucky to get the respect it did.

But The Statement again arrived with
Oscar-related ambitions. And again with no small dose of anachronism. It
certainly has some characteristics of an aging auteur’s work. War criminal
Michael Caine has spent forty years evading justice, hidden by the Catholic
Church. In some ways he’s been deadened by this life, but in others he remains
defiant, revealing the same cold-bloodedness that made him a willing
collaborator. Now he’s in danger of discovery. The film is essentially a chase
thriller, but Caine easily runs out of breath when chased; he looks bigger than
usual here, and rather doughy, exactly like a man who’s lived primarily in the
shadows.

The Statement

The film has an
inordinate amount of talking, particularly among the group that’s looking for
Caine. There’s a sense of compulsive contemplation about it, which matches the
plot’s claustrophobic qualities. On the other hand, it doesn’t convey any
particular brooding qualities. It’s the work of a resigned man, apparently
accepting events as the inevitability of time eventually running out. The film
barely has any real suspense, and when the end finally comes, it’s surprisingly
sudden and low-key. In the classic style of the aging auteur, Jewison visibly
pares down the film.

But whereas Hawks
and Wilder and others in parallel circumstances filled the resulting space with
their own ruminations and shadings, Jewison flails around like a confused
fisherman. He fills scenes with pointless exchanges and gimmicks, presumably
meant to add colour but instead resembling the brainwaves of a village hall
dramatist. He never finds a coherent angle on the Caine character, making it
difficult to determine whether he’s perpetually cold-blooded or merely
frightened or reactive (Jewison’s summary in a recent TV interview that the
character “isn’t a very nice man” seems fairly reflective of his take on him).

The Statement’s various “aged” qualities make it way more
interesting than The Hurricane, but
they wind through the film, rather than providing it with artistic definition.
In a way, Jewison’s too spry for his own artistic good. The film needed to be
more fatigued; it needed to be more fully seized by the desperation of time
running out.

Big Fish

Tim Burton’s latest
film feels too like the product of an older man. Burton is known for a zesty
visual panache crossed with a wistful affinity for outcasts and dreamers. He
was a near-ideal director to revive the Batman franchise, although his
indulging of Jack Nicholson in the first film showed his passivity with actors.
Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood are probably his high-water
mark. Most recently, Mars Attacks was
a mere doodle, Sleepy Hollow little
more than that (substantially redeemed, as are so many films, by Johnny Depp)
and Planet of the Apes a
comprehensive bore. With that last film, Burton threatened to become entirely
ordinary, a mere calculating technician.

But Big Fish is a much more personal work –
indeed, that’s almost its undoing. It’s an ambling narrative built around
father-son reconciliation. Billy Crudup is the buttoned-down writer who has
long been ashamed by his overbearing parent’s tall tales; Albert Finney is the
dying patriarch and Ewan McGregor plays him in flashback as a younger man.
Finney’s stories include giants and circuses and witches with eyes that see
into the future and magic towns hidden in the woods. They’re tall tales, but
not so absurd that they might not have some glimmer of truth to them, Crudup
longs to get past all this, to understand the man behind the myths (and thereby
himself), but of course, he gradually realizes Finney isn’t just a blowhard,
that his storytelling might just be a more compelling life strategy than mere
reality.

The movie meanders
along, never provoking more than a passing smile from all its contrivances,
often skirting boredom. Burton has been talking in interviews about the
experience of being a first-time father (with Helena Bonham-Carter, who plays
the witch here) and how that’s prompted him to reflect on his own paternal
relationship. Maybe this then is his first grown-up movie, and we all know
about Hollywood’s screwed-up, sententious sense of what being grown up means.
Still, it would be dishonest of me not to admit that I found the film’s final
stretches remarkably moving, regardless of how far away you see it all coming.

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).